Re: Introducing Photos

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2012/5/9 Debarshi Ray <rishi is lostca se>

> hello from Yorba, makers of Shotwell.

Hi, Adam! We met in Berlin at the Collabora party during the Desktop Summit.
You probably remember me as one of the authors of Solang.

For those who don't know Solang (http://git.gnome.org/browse/solang)
was a photo manager that I wrote during the dying days of GNOME
2.x. It used Tracker >= 0.7.x as its meta-data store and GEGL (a bit
too ahead of its time, maybe) for editing. The viewing, tagging,
searching was functional, but the editing part was quite rudimentary
when I stopped working on it for various reasons.

> Shotwell's goals are exactly those laid out in the design document below:
> to be a lightweight, elegant photo browser/viewer for GNOME supporting
> basic manipulation, easy photo sharing/publishing, slideshows and so on.

> ??If the GNOME team feels that Shotwell has failed in meeting those goals,

> we're highly interested in discussing how Shotwell could be enhanced or
> improved to get there.

Well, one thing, I guess we all agree, is that reinventing the wheel
is bad.  Especially so for a project like ours.

Having said that, one thing which I have always complained about
Shotwell was the fact that it asks me to import my photos into what
looks like a private SQLite database. A quick "git grep sqlite" does
reveal some dependency on it.  You would remember that I discussed
with you and Jim Nelson in Berlin about the possibility of using
Tracker instead. At that point you had reservations about Tracker and
were reluctant to use it. Tracker is a complex beast and there are
consequences in having a hard dependency on it.

 

But today, the Documents application has a hard dependency on
Tracker. It uses it for querying documents, marking them as favourite,
and so on. And in many ways, the Photos application is very closely
related to Documents. So, while one can find ways to implement the
same using a different technology, does it really make sense to
diverge so much in the underlying implementation for these core
applications?  Or should we try to stay as close to each other
possible and consolidate on the underlying foundations?

Secondly, Boxes, Documents and Photos (can potentially) share a lot of
widgets.

That's not a reason at all, Yorba seems open to work on making Shotwell more GNOME 3 friendly... so those widgets can be shared anyway

 

Therefore, for these reasons, if you look at the gnome-photos tree, it
is almost a clone of the gnome-documents application.

So from Shotwell's point of view, would it make sense to replace its
existing SQLite store and UI? Would it not be as good as writing from
scratch?

No.

That makes as much sense as saying that Epiphany should have been written from scratch when the "Web" designs were proposed. We had a browser, a new design, and developers happy to follow those deisgns.

Writing software from scratch is almost always a bad idea:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Shotwell is widely deployed and used, it has a team of people working on it, and a commercial backer. These are VERY important things, prolly the most important things to take into account, you worry too much about the data store technologies, Tracker is great, but it is by no means the only accepted data store in the desktop.

If Yorba is open to follow the designs from the GNOME design team, I can't see any reason why we shouldn't go that way. IMHO is the quickest and more sustainable path to have a great photo browsing experience for GNOME 3.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz